The European court of justice, where judges were asked to rule on whether Google should be treated under law as a publisher of information or simply a host. Photograph: Image Broker/Rex Features
Google is not obliged to delete personal information from its search results, even when that information damages an individual's reputation, an adviser to the European court of justice has decided.
In a long-running case about the "right to be forgotten" by search engines, judges have been asked to rule on whether Google should be treated under law as a publisher of information or simply a host.
The case is based on a complaint by a Spanish man who made a Google search of his name and found a newspaper announcement from several years earlier saying a property he owned was up for auction because of non-payment of social security contributions.
The man asked for the sensitive information to be deleted from Google's search results, and one of Spain's top courts upheld his complaint. The case was referred to the European court of justice in March last year after Google challenged the decision.
Niilo Jääskinen, an advocate general of the European court of justice, said that companies operating in the European Union must adhere to national data protection legislation, but that did not oblige them to remove personal content produced by others.
"Search engine service providers are not responsible, on the basis of the data protection directive, for personal data appearing on web pages they process," the court said in a statement communicating Jääskinen's opinion.
The court is not bound by the advocate general's opinion, but in the majority of cases judges follow the recommendations. The case is not due to conclude before the end of 2013.
Google argued earlier this year that there were "clear societal reasons why this kind of information should be publicly available".
The announcement of property auctioned as part of a legal proceeding was "required under Spanish law and includes factually correct information that is still publicly available on the newspaper's website", wrote William Echikson, Google's head of free expression for Europe.
Google's supporters fear a ruling in favour of deleting private information could open the floodgates to a multitude of demands for data deletion, forcing the search engine to make decisions about what the public has a right to know.
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